Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Shootout at the ZZZ Corral

What time is it? Why that would be 2:45 in the a.m. Eastern Standard Time.

I am still up.

I am still up because Piper is up. She woke up tonight about 12:30, screaming as though the Boogeyman himself had appeared to her, and since my husband has to get up at 5 a.m. to go to the airport, I took her downstairs with me. I figured it would be a few minutes, a half-hour maybe, until she dropped off to sleep again. I could snuggle her on the couch while watching reruns of Jon & Kate Plus 8 or something.

She refused to snuggle. She refused to sit quietly on my lap while I surfed the Internet. She didn't take kindly to playing alone on the floor, either. Then she went through three diapers in a series of rapid-fire pooping incidents the likes of which I haven't experienced since her tiny-infant days. She screamed and threw herself around in my arms when I tried to rock and shush her. She pushed me away when I tried to snuggle her. She screeched in indignation when I put her in the Exersaucer. She howled with fury when I laid her in the pack n' play, even though I turned on the "soothing vibrations" and "nature sounds." She twisted off my lap and very nearly catapulted herself onto the floor when I tried to tell her a soothing bedtime story.

Currently she is sitting on the floor next to me, playing with the straps and zippers on my diaper bag.* She is obsessed with straps, buckles, and zippers lately, as well as taking things out of their container/box/bag, so it fits the bill on all counts. Even though I'm tired and annoyed right now, I am still getting a kick out of watching her studiously test the zippers and chew on the straps and try to pull out the things tucked inside and finger the zipper-pull.

This is a battle of wills. I can outlast her. She barely took any naps at all today (two, less than 20 minutes each, instead of the two hour-plus ones she should have). This may account for my current, slightly crazed, state of mind, but it also means that she'll have to fall some time. She is a tiny person, she's a kid, she has to sleep. I logged less than eighteen total hours of sleep in the week after she was born; I can do it again if I have to. I will win this. I will stay up with her until she passes out while sitting up, if need be.

Edited, 2:55 a.m.: She's on my lap now, because I heard a small thunk and looked down to discover she was no longer playing with the diaper bag but instead taking advantage of the smooth hardwood floors here in the dining room to lay down and push herself around backwards. The thunk was her foot hitting the leg of her high chair - she'd scooted underneath it and gotten stuck. Much squealing ensued.

3:09 a.m.: Ha-ha! I have the power of boob. I win. She dozed off while nursing and I laid her on the couch so I could finish up a few things. Victory!

3:20: I win nothing. She woke up howling, apparently quite pissed-off at being tricked into sleep.

3:35: Dozing...dozing....

3:45: Asleep again on the couch. Complete with little baby snores. Which, while I find them adorable, probably mean that she is congested and has therefore caught The Plague, aka the sinus/respiratory misery that has plowed through everyone else in the house since last week. Well, this means the rest of my week is going to be a totally shit time...

*My diaper bag? Is awesome. Remind me to tell you about it sometime. And I mean that in an "I have a funny story" way, not a "hey, I'm a freak who thinks everyone should hear about idiotically mundane details of my life" way. Okay, well, maybe a little bit the second thing, because I am blogging here.

About Me

Many blogs out there are written by interesting people who traveled the world and had big, exciting lives before they produced children. This is not one of those blogs.
We're first-time parents, so of course we think we know it all. We are Midwesterners who trekked out to the dry mountains of California's Inland Empire and back again, then went South. We have a bunch of cats, smart mouths, two sets of the Firefly dvd's, and an unnaturally large collection of bed linens. You can email us at tragicallyordinary at gmail dot com.